Have you ever wondered how much money you make compared to a Major League Baseball player? I've always heard big salary numbers thrown around, but visualizing it really puts it into perspective. The interactive visualization below can be used to compare your salary and the average US worker's salary to any MLB player across several different statistics from the 2013 season. For example, if a player made $2,000,000 and hit 10 home runs, this equates to being paid $200,000 per home run.

To use the visualization just 1. Enter your salary in the top left corner 2. Select any MLB player 3. Choose one of the fourteen available statistics.

I have always been curious about the number of high school athletes that go on to play in college and the pros, but have always heard a wide range of statistics, so I decided to take a shot at consolidating the numbers across sports and gender. For most of the numbers, I found a great resource, scholarshipstats.com, which tracks the number of high school players in the US along with the number that advance to play on a Division I, II, or III NCAA team. To get the data for the final piece of the funnel, the total number of players in the pros, I looked up how many players are drafted per year to each top tier professional league in the United States.

The visualization below includes major sports in which both males and females have a chance to advance from high school to the top tier league within the US in their respective genders. For this reason, the visualization does not include football. If you are looking for how many high school football players go on to play in college and get drafted to the NFL, there are 1,121,744 boys playing high school football. Of those, 87,256 play in college (1 in 13), and 254 are drafted to the NFL (1 in 4,416 who play in high school; 1 in 344 who play in college).

For the third consecutive year, we are analyzing the cost per win of all 30 teams in Major League Baseball as a way of determining which MLB GM’s are the most efficient with their payrolls. This analysis is particularly interesting in baseball, where the difference between the highest (Yankees at $229M) and lowest (Astros at $22M ) payrolls in baseball are a staggering $207 Million apart. Our 2013 MLB payroll data comes from USA Today.

This year’s analysis was more interesting than usual, due largely to the aforementioned Houston Astros, whose payroll was so low that they only had to win 22 games to break the $1 Million cost per win milestone. The $1 Million cost per win milestone is typically reserved for teams in the top third of MLB cost per win efficiency. In fact, the Astros won a league-worst 51 games, which was good enough to propel them all the way to first in the cost per win efficiency standings this season....

Hello again OSM Fans! We’ve got some great social media stories from the past couple of months, some from sports, and others are just too good not to bring up. Technology keeps pushing our ideas to the next level, so let’s look at some great ways brands are upping the ante.

I want to give a quick digital “shout” to a friend Caleb Mezzy for this great interview with the Director of Digital Media with the Tampa Bay Lightning, James Royer. Among other things in this fantastic interview is how the Lightning are “light years” (pun intended) ahead of others in the digital realm, who James looks to across the sporting platform for inspiration, what he sees as the future of social media, and more - check it out....